As for rice, even if the question of export be reserved for future consideration, there is an enormous local demand which could very well and profitably be supplied locally. Experimental cultivation of this crop in large and suitably watered areas of the Provinces of Buenos Aires, Entre Rios and Córdoba has proved the ease with which it could be grown in them. Another crop in universal demand in both Argentina and Uruguay is MATE, or “Paraguayan Tea,” the leaf of the ILEX PARAGUAYENSIS. This shrub grows wild in the Territory of Misiones and in the Republics of Paraguay and Brazil; and Argentina and Uruguay import it from the latter countries to annual values of several millions of gold dollars. The cultivation of mate yerba only presents difficulty and risk of loss during the very earliest periods of its growth; but study has now shown how to avoid most, at any rate, of such risks, so that it has become an absurdity that such an article of universal daily, indeed hourly, consumption in both of the countries under consideration should not be grown by them in districts so suited for the cultivation of this shrub that they have become its home in a perfectly wild condition. Wherever one goes in Argentina and Uruguay the MATE (as the small gourd in which the infusion of the dust-like YERBA—“herb”—is made, and from which it is sucked up through a special tube called the “bombilla” from its perforated, bulb-shaped end) is omnipresent and usually in working evidence in the hands of one or other member of the household throughout the livelong day. Mate is a stimulant of great sustaining and stomachic qualities; and its use is not followed by the depression which follows excessive tea and coffee drinking. A River Plate _peon_ will go from daybreak to midday, riding or doing physically hard work the whole while, on nothing more than a hunch of bread or a “biscuit” (a hard, dry maize-flour roll) and a few small _mates_. With sugar, mate is very palatable and the taste soon develops into a habit, but in the camp it is usually drunk “bitter,” that is, without sugar, both from motives of economy and because it is popularly supposed to be healthier and more sustaining when taken in that way. At any rate, there can be no doubt that mate growing must one day become a very large and profitable industry in the Northern parts, where the climate is suitably mild, of the two Republics. The Jesuit Fathers, from whom the Territory of Misiones derives its name, were well aware of the wholesome qualities of mate yerba, and it is possible that the now wild growth of the shrub in that Territory owes its existence to their cultivation.